Right Angle began as a column in the now-defunct Sunday magazine in November 1991. The column allowed me the luxury of presenting an alternative to the prevailing left-liberal consensus in India. It has become the implicit signature tune for all my subsequent writings.

Saturday, November 19, 2011

BJP in search of a message

By Swapan Dasgupta

Many decades ago a
distinguished British parliamentarian remarked that Opposition was more about
principles in a way that Government with its preoccupation with compromises
never can. The gentleman, who spent most of his career in the backbenches as a
political untouchable, was a rarity. In real life, the quest for the opposition
space has also involved expedience, inconsistency and, even duplicity. Apart
from moments of crisis such as war or an imminent national breakdown—as in
Greece and Italy—the Opposition has been content to use parliamentary politics
as an arena of one-upmanship.

The underlying belief is
that in most general elections, the electorate votes out a government rather
than vote in an opposition party to power. This is generally true as far as
India is concerned although, in the post-liberalisation era, governments
(particularly in the states) have shown an uncanny ability to secure repeated
re-election.

In the past 12 months, as
the UPA Government has staggered from crisis to crisis and progressively lost
both direction and moral authority, the largest Opposition grouping has acted
on the assumption that victory awaits it whenever the electorate is given a
chance to express itself. Those who had a dejected, hang dog expression after
the 2009 verdict have suddenly acquired an extra spring in their steps. They
have acquired new hangers-on and their gift haul this Diwali turned out to be
full of rich pickings.

It is the illusion of
inevitability that may explain why the BJP has become so purposelessly active
in recent months and why it has lost sight of one of the main functions of
political existence—to deliver a message. Last week, as the UPA Government
finally woke up from its prolonged spell of helpless inactivity and announced a
reform-oriented legislative programme for the winter session of Parliament, the
BJP reacted with astonishing incoherence.

The reason is not far to
seek. Since the election defeat of 2004, the BJP has been in a state of denial
and distraction. The process of denial, which contributed to the most
unproductive five years in opposition, ended after the election results of 2009
and the removal of L.K. Advani from the post of Leader of Opposition. However,
the process of distraction has persisted since the UPA-2 came to power and it
has been fuelled by an unresolved leadership tussle.

The net effect is that
issues have lost focus inside the BJP. The BJP no longer has any real idea of
what it believes and what sort of India it would like to build after replacing
the UPA with its own coalition government. The impulses that propel individuals
and communities to favour the party over the Congress are very much there:
nationalism, business-friendly economics, deregulation and oodles of cultural
symbolism. How this translates into the globalised world of the 21st
century is, however, left vague and unstated.

At one time the party loved
the ideologues it inherited from the RSS; today, a crass philistinism rules the
roost. Under Nitin Gadkari, an enormously successful, self-made businessman
from Nagpur, the BJP has junked its earlier obsession with austere living and
simple thinking. Today there is a belief that politics is about the timely
deployment of resources—and plenty of it. Gadkari himself typifies the belief
that political messaging is an incidental add-on: money is the key to securing political
influence. In Maharashtra, Gadkari opposed Pramod Mahajan but in Delhi he has
replicated his adversary’s style.

The BJP, for example, must
have spent a staggering amount of money in the arrangements and mobilisation of
the three yatras undertaken by three veteran leaders. Yet, there the political
return on monetary investment is certain to be pitiful for the simple reason
that there was a mismatch between the feeble message and the choreography.

The BJP is no longer sure of
what it believes in—not in foreign policy which appears to be decided by
embassy liaisons and junkets, not in economics which appears to flow from
corporate lobbying, and certainly not in the negotiable moral economy of
politics. The party has designated a working group to forge a Vision Document
of sorts to educate the party about its core beliefs—after all, Deendayal
Upadhyaya died some 47 years ago. But in the true traditions of those who write
books without reading them, the project has actually been ‘outsourced’ to a
Karnataka-based entrepreneur.

This is fairly typical.
Having grown from a modest-sized party to a challenger to the Congress in a
remarkably short period of time, the BJP has been unable to put into place
alternative systems of self-regulation. While abusing the Congress system of
patronage and cronyism, it has allowed the same system to take hold of the
party’s nerve centres, with disastrous consequences. Karnataka is by far the
worst example but recall that it was the opposition to cronyism that led to
B.C.Khanduri’s removal as chief minister in 2009. Khanduri was restored once it
became clear that his successor’s rampany cronyism was likely to be rejected by
voters.

What has been
happening in the BJP constitutes a betrayal of all those who believed in the
creation of a wholesome non-Congress alternative. Fortunately, the rot is only
skin deep and hasn’t affected the party’s vitality. But it is important that
something is done now, well before the 2014 elections, to restore decorum and integrity.
There is a good second-tier leadership that is capable of undertaking a spring
cleaning.

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About Me

The Right is an endangered community in India's English-language media. I happen to be one of the few to have retained a precarious toehold in the mainstream media. I intend this blog as a sounding board of ideas and concerns.
You can read the details of my education, professional experience and political inclinations on Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swapan_Dasgupta).
RIGHT ANGLE is an archive of my published articles. USUAL SUSPECTS is my blog.